The Monday Media Diet with Emanuel Derman

On Cape Town, theoretical physics, and Alien Hearts

Emanuel Derman is a friend of WITI and the author of My life as a Quant. He has a forthcoming memoir, called Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian. We will run an excerpt in March, closer to publication. I loved his Being Foreign edition for WITI. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I live in Manhattan where I’ve spent most of my adult life. I love NYC. I’ve had several serial but related careers. I grew up in an immigrant off-the-boat Polish-Jewish family and community in Cape Town in the 1950s and 60s and then came to Columbia University to get a PhD in theoretical physics. I wanted to try to understand the laws of the universe. For seven dedicated years after my PhD I did research on the standard model in particle physics, and then switched and became an early quant developing advanced options models at Goldman Sachs for the next seventeen. Finally, I became a professor at Columbia for the last twenty. My book “My Life as a Quant” was a popular memoir of my not uncommon trajectory from physics to capital markets. My forthcoming book, “Brief Hours and Weeks,” is a recollection of boyhood and youth in that now lost world in Cape Town,

Describe your media diet.

I always feel ashamed when I read MMD each week because I’m pretty much an MSM guy compared to everyone else who writes here. I can’t listen to podcasts — I grew up in a country without TV and I like to read. I would rather read the back of a cereal box than listen to a podcast, in part because I can skim the text on the cereal box when I want to. I don’t like my pace controlled. It’s probably a failing.

That said, let me begin. My major nonpersonal sin is that I spend much too much time endlessly looking at Twitter, and now, sometimes, Bluesky. Twitter used to be more of a salon, now it feels like a political battleground populated by nameless cryptofans, but I can’t quite quit yet. I get the NY Times, the WSJ, and the FT. Since the start of the pandemic, I have only online subscriptions and I don’t read them thoroughly. I look at The Guardian and the Drudge Report. I get The Economist and I try to read that more assiduously. I sometimes flip between CNN and Fox News as each one shows an ad. I subscribe (for many decades) to paper versions of The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and unlike the newspapers above, I actually read those in more detail rather than skim. I get and look at N+1. And I subscribe to Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, a beautifully written eloquent financial newsletter.

What’s the last great book you read?

“Alien Hearts,” perhaps the last book by Guy de Maupassant, translated from the French by Richard Howard. It’s about a man who devotes himself to being in love with a woman who isn’t quite capable of the same devotion, though she likes and perhaps loves him in her own way, and he can’t be satisfied with what she can genuinely offer.

What are you reading now?

“The Marquise of O-” by Heinrich von Kleist. As you can see, I’m going through a phase of reading noncontemporary books. It’s a mystery novella in which von Kleist narrates a story with protagonists, any and all of whom one could find a reason for judging severely, but he withholds any opinion in favor of a dispassionate description. It makes you think, as a study guide on the internet accurately says, about “honor, social conventions, and the complexities of desire and morality.” I’m not really giving anything away by telling you the first line:

In M-, a large town in northern Italy, the widowed Marquise of O-, a lady of unblemished reputation and the mother of several well-bred children, published the following notice in the newspapers: that, without her knowing how, she was in the family way; that she would like the father of the child she was going to bear to report himself; and that her mind was made up, out of consideration for her people, to marry him.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

These days, with either the Weekend FT or The Economist, I turn to the back and start with the arts and book reviews.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

More poetry (said he, wishfully, for himself and for others).

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

WolframAlpha, an online natural-language tool to answer math and general quantitative questions about the world. Try giving it your Christian name and find out how many people were born in each year with that name in the past. You’ll find your parents tended to follow fashion.

Plane or train?

Plane. Practically speaking, for the places I go to.

What is one place everyone should visit?

New York City. And after that, the Karoo in South Africa. I love that dry semi-desert landscape and its little towns. I imagine, to be very clichéd, that I lived there in another life, and so it beckons to me. Of course, I’ve only been there once. New Mexico feels similar but it’s unfortunately not in Africa.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Finding a title for my forthcoming book took a long trip down a rabbit hole. In the second year of the pandemic I wrote a Substack newsletter called “My Life as an African,” which really was about my life as an African, since I was born there and lived there for the first 21 years. Around mid 2022, I began to think about turning it into a book — a memoir, slightly fictionalized, a kind of autofiction about growing up in an immigrant family in Cape Town. I liked the title “My Life as an African.” It had a nice perhaps slightly trolling zing to it, as well as being truthful. But it turned out that many people thought it was cultural appropriation to call myself an African, though I feel it's a consequential and unremovable part of my history. For perhaps a year while working on writing it, I kept almost continually trying out other titles such as “My Life in Africa,” “An African Childhood,” “Out of Africa” (yes, sic), “Cape Town,” “Capetown,” and many more. All of them felt boring and forced and I still toyed with the original. I was finally pushed to reject it, absolutely, by seeing a Larry David Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which he referred to an Elon-Muskish character by saying, very disgustedly, “He’s not African, he’s South African!” After much more agonizing, I eventually settled on “Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian.” The Brief Hours and Weeks is from Shakespeare sonnet 116, part of which I quote in the book:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

I still don’t like the final title nearly as much as “My Life as an African,” but it does reflect the lifelong persistence of the loves and affections of intense childhood.